Message From the Director

The human brain has long been characterized as the last, great frontier of medicine. For generations, scientists have marveled at the complexities of the brain and its capacity to shape our consciousness and navigate the world around us. We have strived to understand how genetic, environmental, and traumatic insults can give rise to some of the most devastating human diseases.

The Ernest J. Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience was created as an aspiration. That aspiration had its origins in the hard work and creative energies of a large body of individuals at the University of Rochester who recognized that the answers to the big questions in neuroscience were beyond the capabilities of any single scientist or lab and would require harnessing and coordinating the extraordinary wealth of talent in the field of neuroscience here in Rochester.

The University of Rochester is one of the nation’s leading institutions in neurosciences, and together we can play a major part in defining the field over the next decade to come. The Del Monte Institute is harnessing the collective scientific expertise across the institution and buttressing these efforts with cutting-edge technologies, resources, and expertise that will enable us to deepen our understanding of a wide range of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders and more quickly translate discoveries into new ways to diagnose, prevent, and treat these complex diseases.

As a neuroscientist, I am understandably biased, but surely there is nothing more intriguing, more exhilarating, more vexing, than the study of the 1400 grams of complexity that inhabits the interior of our skulls. It is what makes us what we are as sentient being, the very organ by which we go about studying it.